Elsa is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at Goldsmiths (principal supervisor: Professor Deirdre Osborne) interested in studies of gender, performance, post-colonialism, and translation theory. Her PhD thesis, entitled ‘Elizabeth Robins’ Magnetic North: Translating Gender in Boreal Literature and Theatre’, analyzes Robins’ contributions to fin de siècle British theatre and literature.
Robins presents two different ‘Norths’ in her fiction and English play translations: one Scandinavian—encompassing Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—and one Arctic—including Alaska and Greenland. Elsa’s research places Robins’ oeuvre in relation to ‘borealism’ defined by Sylvain Briens as ‘displacement of the [northern] landscape’ by poets and artists whose aesthetic and intellectual priorities transform it (‘Poétique boréale. Le « Nord » comme métaphore dans la littérature française du XIXe siècle’ 2020). She demonstrates that Robins’ conviction towards women’s emancipation—through suffrage and bodily autonomy—bonds the two ‘Norths’ present in her work and transforms them into a liminal space wherein British audiences can imagine challenging traditional gender hierarchies. Her thesis argues that Robins disrupts constructions of nineteenth-century women’s roles, and both confronts and reifies imperial hierarchies of class and race in her work.
The first two chapters argue that Robins’ imagination of ‘the North’ as a place of possibility to challenge constructions of motherhood competes with imperialist, racial, religious, and socio-economic constraints placed on women and mothers in the UK and Scandinavia. Robins’ translations are contextualized amidst fin de siècle women’s emancipation movements and analysis focuses on the politics of translating and producing Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (Vaudeville, 1891) and The Master Builder (Trafalgar Theatre, 1893). Robins’ play Alan’s Wife (The Independent Theatre, 1893) written with her friend and collaborator Lady Florence Bell receives attention in relation to its translation and adaptation from Elin Ameen’s Swedish novella ‘Befriad’ (‘Set Free’, 1891). Comparisons between the two texts display linguistic differences in Robins’ portrayals of motherhood and gender expectations, which are further set in relief when evaluated alongside Ameen’s 1895 back-translation of the play as En Moder (A Mother).
The last two chapters demonstrate how Robins’ role as a translator outside of the theatre and as an author in her own right implicate her in the transmission of imperial ideologies. Close readings of Robins’ The Magnetic North, ‘Monica’s Village’/i>(1905), and personal diaries written about Alaska demonstrate how her translations of the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen’s journals on Greenland influence her own writing. As the thesis will argue, not only is the examination of Robins’ language inextricably linked to the cultural shift in gender roles and rights for women in the USA and western Europe in the early twentieth century, but it also displays how political prioritizations can lead to the erasure and exoticization of Indigenous communities in writing and translation. <
In addition to her PhD research, Elsa enjoys experimenting with digital humanities projects. In 2020 she created a genetic digital edition of Michael Field’s drama In the Name of Time (1919) and gave a presentation about the experience at the “Women Staging and Restaging the Nineteenth Century” Conference hosted by the Universitat de Vàlencia in October 2022. Additionally, as a coordinator for EcoAusten, a digital humanities project at Pacific Lutheran University, she writes articles, contributes annotations, and helps organize social annotations of Jane Austen’s novels.
